| « National Technical Reports Library | Nature News special issue on data sharing » |
Compact for open access publishing equity
On Monday, five major research universities - including the University of California, Berkeley - announced a new Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. The universities have each pledged to develop "durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals..." Besides UC Berkeley, the other participating universities are Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and MIT.
This compact further shows UC Berkeley's interest in open access, already expressed through our Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program to "subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication."
For more information, check out the coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.
Search
Sitemap
Contact
webmaster
UC Berkeley Library
UC Berkeley home
Copyright © 2009 The Regents of the
University of California.
All rights reserved.
Server manager: contact
1 comment
Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/627-guid.html
Regardless of the size of the asking price ("reasonable" or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of Open Access Journal Publishing fees (Gold OA) until and unless the university or funder has first mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of its own published journal article output (regardless of whether published in OA or non-OA journals).
There are so far five signatories to the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive SCOAP3 consortium.
If Harvard's and MIT's example is followed, and Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold OA commitments, then there's no harm done.
But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in the foot insofar as universal OA -- so long within its reach, yet still not grasped -- is concerned.
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53
Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.
Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999
Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.
Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.
Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.
Harnad, S. (2008) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. To appear in: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.
Leave a comment